


The Rockstar and the Mole Woman

by Lynzee005



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Masturbation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-18
Updated: 2020-02-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:14:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22782325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lynzee005/pseuds/Lynzee005
Summary: Roman rolls his eyes and quirks his mouth into that sarcastic smile of his. “Pretty sure the last time someone conquered Constantinople, it marked the end of the Roman empire,” he says. “How’s that for symbolism?”Gerri visits Roman on the boat after his return from Turkey.
Relationships: Gerri Kellman/Roman "Romulus" Roy
Comments: 5
Kudos: 65





	The Rockstar and the Mole Woman

It’s very unlike Gerri to initiate anything. She’s not an ideas woman. She never has been. Other people tell her what they want done and she does it, willingly and very well. If anyone asks her for her opinion, she sways with the prevailing winds. She doesn’t bump against the grain or stand taller than anyone else; that’s how you get roughed up. No, Gerri is wise and observant, a thinker-listener. It’s what she excels at.

But it’s been a weird day and part of her just doesn’t give two shits anymore, and that’s something that ought to scare her.

Ought to, but doesn’t.

Gerri has no fucking idea what she’s doing and is doing it with gusto.

Maybe she can blame the bottle of rosé in her bloodstream and an afternoon of heatstroke. She should have taken a page from Shiv’s book and stayed out of the sun, or at least worn a hat. But the same anxiety that gulped down 750ml of wine had also kept her rooted to the sundeck. She worried that the tightness across her forehead and the apples of her cheeks signalled the start of a sunburn, and somehow that bothered her more than the thought that she would be the one thrown to the wolves the next day; she’d have to face a hungry media mob with the stain of bad leisure decision-making stamped across her skin. That pissed her off.

A full Mediterranean moon hangs huge and heavy in the blue-black above her head as she finally sits up from the deck chair just off the dining room near the stern of the boat— _The boat_ , she thinks; it’s a palace on the water but it’s still “the boat” and it's ten kinds of ridiculous, but who is she to question it? The world spins just a little, and she wants to say it’s because of the waves or whatever, but she knows better; she’s not _drunk_ drunk, just tipsy, the warm kind of tipsy that used to make her giggly when she was in college. She picks up the empty bottle and her empty glass and hauls it with her into the dining room, partly because she wants to make the staff's job a bit easier, partly because she wants to destroy the evidence of her party for one.

She also just wants to go to sleep, and it _is_ rather late. No one else seems to be awake, or if they are they’re somewhere else, and she wasn’t invited. And she’s surprisingly very much okay with that. She doesn’t mind being alone, doesn’t find it lonely. When it’s just her and her thoughts—she likes that. There’s no keeping up appearances, no masks to wear when it’s just her.

_Maybe I’ll go watch TV_ , she thinks. _Watch a movie. Play a little game of Fuck-Marry-Kill with the people on this boat before passing out..._

The thought amuses her; she walks down the hallways and corridors toward her cabin, her chiffon beach wrap trailing in her wake, narrating to herself— _Frank’s room… I bet he’d be a boring fuck—lights off, missionary; do you think he cries after?—and I’d kill myself if I had to be married to him, so he’s gotta go. There’s Karl’s room… he’s into kinky shit but the degrading kind, not the fun kind. Just kill him on principle. Connor?_ She almost laughs. _He’s sweet but dumb. I bet sex with him is exhausting. Tantric, probably. Not pleasurable. Shit. Maybe I’d marry him though, and then fuck Willa on the side—yeah, that could be an arrangement I’d like. I guess I’d marry Tom. There’s no point in killing him; not worth the effort. But then sex with him would probably be the same—he’s from Minnesota for fuck’s sake; vanilla is a spice there, isn’t it? But he’s a pretty loyal lap dog, so yeah: marry. But then I’d probably have to kill Shiv, only because she’d kill me first, without flinching. Now Kendall…_

It’s only when she reaches Roman’s door that she realizes she’s passed her own, a long time ago. She almost pulls back, follows the tide back out and away from what feels like the point of no return just like she always does. Her hands at her sides are clenched tight and tingling; when she sees her own hand in front of her eyes and hears the _rap-rap-rap_ of her knuckles on the door, it’s not her own.

_Fuck fuck fuck, what the fuck are you doing?!_

He answers the door and he’s still fully dressed, which surprises her, because what is he doing in his room fully clothed at this hour? He has a drink in one hand, his phone pinched between his shoulder and his ear so he could have his other hand free to open the door; his hair is messy, flopped over his forehead, which also exhibits the same telltale signs of sunburn that she’s certain colours her face, too. Two small accent lamps spill little 40w arcs of light on the floor, and there’s a silent flicker in the corner that tells her that the TV is on and muted. She’s interrupting, that much is obvious; she wrinkles her nose and lifts an apologetic hand.

“Sorry,” she mouths.

Roman just kind of stares at her for a moment, and it’s clear that he’s as stunned as she is that she’s there—it’s _never_ Gerri coming to Roman...what the fuck could _Gerri_ need from _Roman?!_ But as they stand there with white noise silence and the width of a half-open door between them, it strikes her that maybe he’s not stunned by her as much as he’s just _stunned_. Because he’s wearing the same look on his face that he had all day, since the moment he and Karl and Jamie arrived on the boat that afternoon.

No. Not stunned then.

Shattered.

It takes until right then for Gerri to feel the pitch of anxiety that she’d needed a whole bottle of wine to swallow return to strike the center of her chest, She’s not even tipsy anymore; she’s fiercely alert and she can’t find her breath, and she remembers how it felt to hear that Roman was being held hostage at his hotel in Turkey, and how that news—delivered in thirty seconds of conversation as if it was an ATN chyron running across the bottom of the more important top story at center screen—had made an entire congressional hearing seem so insignificant all of a sudden. She remembers how she’d gone home that night not angry at Tom for waffling or the whistleblower for… blowing, or whatever… or Gil Eavis for starting the whole fucking thing, but angry at the entire nation of Turkey and the whole of Central Asia, really. How she’d actually fucking cried about it, and nearly bought herself a plane ticket to Istanbul on account.

And now he’s here, and he’s safe, and she can’t breathe for fear that it’s all a horrible illusion.

“Can I call you back?” Roman says, without breaking eye contact.

Gerri stays exactly put.

He hangs up on whoever he was talking to and the door starts to swing closed; his foot shoots out to stop it, to kick it back open again. “Fancy meeting you here."

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” she says.

For a moment he looks confused, but then he remembers the phone in his hand, and he makes a face as he pockets it. “Nah, whatever,” he says. “There are more important things than… whatever the fuck that was.”

She can’t help but wonder if he means that she is the more important thing, because it’s kind of obvious that that’s what he’s saying. But she holds her ego in check nonetheless; he could have been on the phone with the subscription department of _The New York Times_ for all she knows.

_That_ makes her laugh. _Roman Roy doesn’t read the fucking Times_...

He pushes the door completely open and moves aside to let her in, and Gerri steps across the threshold of the room and hopes she’s made it look like the most natural thing in the world when she knows plainly that it isn’t. When the door shuts behind her, it is suddenly very real; she hears it click shut like the barrel of a revolver is pressed against her skull.

Not a good mental image, considering.

“So what can I do you for?” Roman drawls in his signature disinterested cadence, and Gerri manages a laugh and rolls her eyes.

“Couldn’t sleep,” she says, trailing a fingernail across the credenza where the decanters sit. “You gonna offer me a drink?”

Roman scoffs and walks over to join her, and pours two, maybe two and a half, fingers’ worth of scotch into a glass, and then tops up his own to match. She doesn’t have the heart to tell him that she doesn’t need that much to drink; she just needs something to do with her hands.

He gives her the glass.

“It’s not gonna be you.”

Again, she shrugs. “Well,” she says as she clinks her glass against his. “Then why do I feel like Robespierre holding my shattered jaw in place, waiting in the Place de la Revolution for the guillotine to finish the job?”

The reference flies over Roman’s head. Gerri takes another sip and feels foolish.

Roman downs his drink and shakes his head, pointing his finger at her around the glass. “If anyone is _Robespierre_ , it’s… just… fuck, it’s not going to be you, okay?” he says. “You’re too loyal. Christ, you're a dinosaur. For whatever sick and unfathomable reason, you’vebeen loyal for _years_."

She nods a little absently; she's oddly comforted by his words. “Well thank you, Roman. That… that means a lot.”

“It does?” He seems genuinely shocked.

“Yeah,” she tells him straight, and when the dumbstruck look doesn't immediately melt off his face, she makes her point a little clearer. “The boy king? The new Conqueror of Constantinople? Returned from the brink crowned in laurels? And he thinks I’m not so bad?" she laughs. "That’s kind of a big deal.”

Roman rolls his eyes and quirks his mouth into that sarcastic smile of his as he fingers his glass and hunches his shoulders up to his earlobes. “Pretty sure the last time someone conquered Constantinople, it marked the end of the Roman empire,” he says. “How’s that for symbolism?”

Gerri squints at him, as if to ask _You don’t know who Robespierre is but the fall of Rome, that’s in your wheelhouse?_ but she doesn’t say that—she doesn’t say anything—because Roman sits himself down on the end of his bed and it’s like the air is sucked from the room; the force of it deflates him. He buries his face in his hands before scrubbing them both back over his hair.

“I fucked it, Gerri,” he says, though she can barely hear him at first. “I could’ve died, and in the end I still fucked it. Even with a fucking gun to my head I fucked it all…”

Gerri can’t take her eyes off him. The way she’d heard tell, Roman had absolutely _killed it_ in the meeting that eventually transpired between the Turkish trillionaire’s son and the Turkish hostage takers employed by the Turkish king’s daughter’s husband in the Turkish ballroom. That the deal went nowhere was not Roman’s fault; he seems to have been the only one who walked away with his head still properly screwed onto his shoulders.

She wants to tell him that, but can’t find a way to do so without sounding condescending and motherly, and that’s _not_ the tone she wants to strike right now.

“What do you mean?”

He stares at the TV—muted still, on some late-night Greek TV news programme—and for a long while says nothing. So Gerri joins him, directing her attention to the contents of the idiot box across the room. They can’t hear a word, obviously, and the captions are in Italian for some reason, but the slim brunette with the flawlessly tanned complexion sitting behind the news desk seems to be talking about some kind of government deal involving road infrastructure, judging by the video they keep playing of a man in coveralls next to a pile of steaming asphalt.

“It’s not going to be you either, Rome,” she says without looking away from the screen. “And you didn’t fuck anything. In fact you probably _saved_ the whole thing, if I’m being honest. The only one with the balls to recognize a shit deal when you see it. Maybe that management training worked.” She takes a swig from her glass and it goes down like sandpaper, which is what she wants, so she’s okay with it; anything to distract her from the tingling she feels everywhere else.

“And just in case you didn’t know this already—because I certainly didn’t see it up on deck earlier today, so maybe you _don’t_ know—” she hates that she’s mincing words, biding time, circling the block where her sentiment lives. She stacks her spine and looks down her nose at the TV. “But I’m glad you’re home. Glad you’re safe.”

And it’s maternal and she isn’t sure it’s struck the right tone, but fuck it: she means it. Her chest feels cold but her heart is beating normally, and she can breathe again.

"You are?" 

She nods. "Why wouldn't I be?"

A man in a blue suit delivers the weather forecast—Gerri does a quick calculation in her head to figure out that 25°C is about 80°F like it’s going to matter what the thermometer says when she’s thrown overboard the next day—and the show cuts to commercial.

Roman shifts on the mattress. When she looks over at him he’s got his hand down the front of his pants. She shivers.

“Are we going to do this then?” he asks.

She swirls her glass and watches as the amber liquid whirlpools in the palm of her hand, then downs what’s left and puts it back on the credenza. She’s already barefoot—they all are, even though Marcia isn’t here and who the fuck cares? What are they going to track in from the fucking ocean?—and she flexes her toes against the rug beneath her feet. Then she walks across the room until she’s standing a foot away from him, and at five-and-whatever feet tall she might as well be a skyscraper for how much she towers over him.

“Stand up.”

His belt buckle clanks obscenely as he gets to his feet. He stands there. His hand continues to move beneath the unbuttoned waistband of his trousers; she can see it in her peripheral. She takes a half step closer, and hears his breath hitch, catching in his throat, and it’s almost as if he’s...

_No_ , she thinks. _He’s not_.

But he is. And it bowls her over.

_I could’ve died..._

Roman shuffles his feet against the carpet and his hand stops moving, but he’s still wrist deep in his trousers and it’s terribly undignified, but then again so is weeping openly in front of your father’s company’s general counsel, and also he's been jerking off to the sound of her voice for how long now? So it’s a line they’ve already crossed. Who cares?

Gerri brings her hand up to the side of his face and smoothes her thumb over his cheekbone, and he half-sobs, audibly, before leaning his forehead against hers.

“Fuck.”

So she’s the wallpaper, just like he said she was, and so that makes him the Warhol hanging in front of it. And if that’s the case, well, she will happily—eagerly—play that supporting role for the rest of her life. If he’ll let her.

And he will. She knows it.

“It’s a hollow crown, isn’t it?” she asks.

“I don’t know what that means, Gerri.”

She laughs. “You’ll be alright, Roman.” She feels him nod against her, there in the flickering light of a television, beneath a Mediterranean moon.

**Author's Note:**

> I just finished Season 2 last night. I thought there was no need to write fanfic for something that is so startlingly perfect, and I never expected this to pour out of me, but then I saw the way Gerri looked when Roman came home again after the hostage situation, how shattered they both looked, and I had to explore it. Takes place the night before the blood sacrifice.


End file.
